Lessons learnt as a young employee for a grown-up Leadership. Commitment - a route to easy management or to excellent work?

When your boss talks about commitment, he is saying something different, as you may understand.

For most bosses from the old-fashioned world, commitment means that people will work harder and more effectively for no more investment than a few warm words and a handshake.

Most employees understand this to mean that they are trustworthy and reliable, but it's a hard lesson to learn, you're not.

It is all about trust, when we want to be trusted, the feeling of commitment rises. But all those little signs that you don't trust us make us aware that commitment is not expected.

In fact, these bosses want us to take orders as before, to spend time in the office regardless of work or anything else, just to be there.

They want minutes counted, not results. If it's really important to you that we spend those 5 minutes waiting in the office, don't talk about commitment, it's ridiculous.

As Steve Jobs suggested, don't hire experts if you keep telling them how their job works. They will tell you.

This is what commitment means: you, as our boss, have given us the opportunity to be free and self-managed, and we are rewarding that approach with better results and a strong identification with our company.

You trust us and we trust you. That's it.

But without that trust there is no commitment, and unless you understand that part of the approach, you won't succeed.

But the main issue is honesty. If you tell us something you think we want to hear, but then show us that you don't really care, that's very risky with us.

It makes us feel betrayed, and when that feeling rises, we first work to rule, then we stop working to rule, and then we leave.

And a lot of you old-fashioned bosses think we can just hire better people. You might be wrong, because we're a generation of well-educated people who don't care what you think, we just go on living our lives.